In My Friend Greg, Joaquim Procopio begins with a modest instrument pointed at the stars and then does something rare in contemporary speculative fiction: he lets wonder arrive slowly.
The narrator, Jota, is not a superhero, not a chosen savior in the usual cinematic sense, and not a young man chasing adventure. He is a Brazilian scientist and retired medical doctor whose curiosity is disciplined, tender, and sometimes comic.
At an amateur astronomy gathering in rural São Paulo, he meets Greg, a strange blond visitor with a magnificent telescope, dark glasses, uncertain explanations, and a relationship to the sky that feels, from the first pages, both intimate and suspicious.
The book’s own synopsis calls the story “a love story between two scientists,” one terrestrial and one extraterrestrial, but that description only begins to suggest the odd emotional temperature of Procopio’s novel.
What follows is science fiction with the patience of a diary and the temperament of a scientist who cannot stop noticing things. A telescope mount, a rural gate, a cool geodesic dome hidden among eucalyptus trees, a mysterious camera, a chessboard, a basement, a farm that is not exactly a farm: Procopio builds his world through instruments, procedures, habits, and small discontinuities. The reader is not pushed through revelation. The reader is invited to observe.
That observational quality is the novel’s signature pleasure. Procopio’s own background gives the novel an unusual texture. Writing under the pen name Joaquim Procopio, the author is Joaquim Procopio de Araujo Filho, a Brazilian MD and PhD from Universidade de São Paulo, with postdoctoral work at Cornell University Medical College in membrane biophysics. He has published more than 60 scientific papers across fields, including membrane biophysics, artificial membranes, bioelectricity, theoretical biophysics, diabetes, fatty acids, and physiology teaching. That résumé matters, not because fiction needs credentials, but because this book’s imagination is inseparable from scientific habit. It does not merely decorate itself with science. It thinks scientifically, sometimes obsessively, sometimes beautifully.
The love story at the center of the book is stranger than the familiar romance between human and alien. Antonina, the extraterrestrial scientist who becomes Jota’s mentor and object of fascination, is not written as a fantasy of softness or conquest. She is brilliant, commanding, vulnerable, and, in Jota’s eyes, almost unbearable to contemplate. The manuscript frames their relationship around a provocative idea: domination not through violence or power, but through “a sort of love.” That theme gives the novel its charge. It asks whether love can remain love when intelligence, dependence, awe, and influence become dangerously unequal.
There is a philosophical boldness here that recalls older speculative traditions, when science fiction was willing to pause for lectures, theories, arguments, and metaphysical unease. Yet My Friend Greg is also intimate, even domestic. Its alienness often appears over coffee, bread, homemade liquor, chess, car washing, improvised hospitality, and the smell of eucalyptus. Procopio understands that the uncanny becomes more powerful when it sits at the lunch table.
The result is a sprawling, eccentric, deeply earnest novel about contact, not only between species, but between forms of knowing. Jota looks at the night sky and sees beauty, distance, and time. Greg’s group looks at Earth and sees crisis, potential, and mystery. Antonina looks at Jota and seems to see something he does not yet understand about himself. That triangular tension, between science, love, and destiny, gives the book its emotional architecture.
Readers looking for clipped minimalism will not find it here. My Friend Greg is expansive, digressive, and unapologetically idea-driven. It belongs to the tradition of novels that want to contain a universe, not simply tell a story. Its ambitions are large: ecology, intelligence, medicine, memory, extraterrestrial civilization, the fragility of Earth, the limits of human perception, and the bewildering force of affection. The book’s table of contents alone suggests its range, moving from astronomy and the hidden farm to questions of intelligence, planetary organization, medical transformation, artificial gravity, and other speculative frontiers.
But beneath the scale, what lingers is the voice of a man trying to describe the moment his ordinary categories failed him. “I report them with no expectation that someone believes they actually took place,” Jota says at the beginning, framing the narrative as a record made against ridicule. That sentence gives the novel its human key. This is not merely a book about extraterrestrials. It is a book about credibility, wonder, humiliation, longing, and the loneliness of experiences too large to share easily.
My Friend Greg may be marketed as science fiction, but its deeper subject is surrender: to evidence, to beauty, to intelligence greater than one’s own, and to a love that arrives disguised as an experiment. For readers willing to follow its patient accumulation of detail, Procopio’s novel offers a rare pleasure: the feeling that the universe is not only bigger than we imagined, but more intimate, more demanding, and more emotionally dangerous.
My Friend Greg is available online for readers drawn to Joaquim Procopio’s strange, searching, and deeply imaginative universe. Those willing to sit with its questions will find a science-fiction love story that follows a few of the genre’s usual patterns.
